7 Tips to Nail Your Investor Meeting – Part 16 of How to Make a Pitch Deck for Investors | Ep. 129 | Business Podcast
Summary
Part 16 of our Masterclass on How to Make a Pitch Deck for Investors to raise money for your company in 13 slides.
You’ve built your investor pitch deck, lined up meetings with investors and now it’s time for your investor meeting. What do you do in the meeting?
These seven tips will give you the playbook to make sure you’re giving you and your company the very best shot at raising money from investors. They’re prepare you for what to expect so you’re not caught off guard.
Put these tips to work and go get’em!
What is this Perfecting Your Pitch Masterclass Series?
We’re perfecting your pitch so you have the very best chance to raise the money from investors to take your business to the next level.
If you want to raise or borrow money you need the right pitch deck. Do it wrong and it’s the difference between raising the money you need for your business and not raising any.
You’ll get it right by following this simple, proven, battle tested thirteen slide pitch deck outline.
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Hello Friends. Welcome to the show. Today we’re on part 16 of our master class on how to make a pitch deck for investors and we wrapped up our pitch deck in our last episode. And today we’re going to talk about seven tips when actually pitching the investors. Here we go. Welcome to build a business success secrets. The only podcast that provides straight talk for entrepreneurs, whether you’re an entrepreneur, starting with an idea or growing your business. This show is for you.
We’ll teach you how to build a strong mindset, powerful body and profitable business so you can achieve success and here’s your host, Brandon. See White, we’re wrapping up our master class went seven tips for your investor meeting number one. Research your audience. One of the things that we do as entrepreneurs is that any time we go talk to someone with money were so eager to get the money that we believe we need. That we don’t actually research the people that were meeting with. At least not to the extent that we should.
A few tips there, read their website, read the bios of all the partners just in case another partner comes into the meeting that you didn’t know an associate or a principal, whatever they are, you want to have some background on them so that you’re not talking blind. That will be the worst thing that could happen. You could say the wrong thing or it will also show that you do your diligence, which will add to your credibility.
The other thing that you can do is look at the companies that they’ve invested in And then go to those websites and even reach out to one of the founders and say, Hey, I’m meeting with such and such firm. I know they invested in your company. Could you spend five or 10 minutes with me on the phone to give me some feedback. That will be great diligence for you. # two. Present realistic data all along. When we were building your pitch deck, we talked about giving aggressive goals but realistic goals. Just do a quick audit to make sure that your numbers are realistic.
They need to be aggressive because we want to shoot for something that’s more aggressive than easy but make sure that they’re plausible. That is really where someone in the investor meeting will drill down on you because they may know more than you do because they’ve seen more deals or they’ve had experience in the market. Hopefully it’s why we want the investor but make sure that you’ve got realistic data. # three nail your elevator pitch. This is the first thing that anyone is going to hear about your business and elevator pitches are hard to get right.
So you’ve got to practice practice practice, say it to yourself in the shower when you’re running, when you’re riding your bike, when you’re working out whatever you’re doing and you have spare time practice that pitch deck. The other thing that helps me is to write it down because when you write it down, you see it, you remember it and then you can switch around words or you can see it doesn’t make sense. So you’ve got to nail that elevator pitch practice number four. Be aware of your time and what I mean by that is likely your investor meeting is going to go about 50 minutes, especially if you’re meeting with a venture capital firm.
These venture capital firms are seeing lots of deals and they’re seeing them on the hour, So they’ll normally scheduled for about 15 minutes so that there’s time in between to catch their breath, use their bathroom And go on to the next meeting. So be aware of that. You have 13 slides that we’ve gone through in this master class. If you spend two minutes on each slide, that’s 26 minutes. If you spend three minutes on it, it’s 39 minutes.
I’d like to put my watch on the desk or if you have a phone, you can put your phone but make sure that that time is there so that you can be aware and bring someone with you of course, so that you’re not alone and that someone can polk you or kick you under the table and say, hey, you’re going over No five. You will likely get asked an exit question. And what that means is who are you going to sell your business to? Are you going to go public? Are you going to sell it to someone? How are the investors going to get a return on their investment? So research that have a real answer.
Maybe you’ve already talked to some companies that have talked about if you got two X, they’re interested in acquiring you. If you say that Microsoft’s gonna acquire you or amazon’s gonna acquire you, you’re going to need to have some real, um, behind that. Other than just saying it, because that’s what a lot of people say and it is possible for sure. But that’s not a very deep answer. Do some research on who could possibly acquire you? You could have several different scenarios, you could say we’re going to go public. If your economics suggest that you could do that, you could be acquired, you could do a roll up strategy, you could say that your goal is to grow it and then raise more money and buy other companies to grow it.
Whatever it is, at least have a story around that because you will likely get asked the exit question, investors are investing because they do like you, but they’re investing because they want to make a lot of money and they want to understand how they’re going to make a lot of money and in order to get their money liquid again, there’s going to have to be some exit event number six. Back up everything that you have when you go to the investor meeting or if you do it online, what I mean by that is if you have your deck on your computer, have it backed up on a USB stick or something like that, have it in the cloud. If you’re relying on reaching into the cloud when you go into an investor meeting, have it on a stick.
Remember one is none too is one. You cannot have enough backups. The worst thing that could happen is that you can’t show your deck or you can’t present or if you have a demo, that doesn’t work. That can, that will just ruin you don’t want to do that. So make sure you have a backup of everything. Put one in the cloud, put one on your stick, put one on your computer, whatever other type of thing that you need to back up, make sure it’s backed up and then number seven practice you really need to practice and I know this is obvious, it’s an obvious tip, but not enough people do it and what will happen. And I’ve done this myself as I say, oh, I’ve got it in my head. I know it. You may have it in your head and you may know all this information but presenting it is a tempo and you want to be on that tempo, record yourself, fire up a zoom tape yourself.
Or if you if you’re not paying for zoom, I think it’s 30 minutes is for the free version. Fire that thing up. And then when it clicks off, you’re done and you’re like, oh my God create situations where there’s urgency to present and get it done in time. Remember Again that you are going to have about 50 minutes in your meeting. A follow up meeting can go longer. That’s what you’re trying to get here of course. But your first meeting likely goes 50 minutes to an hour if you’re our if you’re lucky and with 13 slides, that’s 26 minutes. If you do two minutes of slide and 39 minutes.
If you do three minutes a slide, Remember it’s not just about giving that presentation. You also want to answer questions, you want to have a discussion that you want to be able to follow up. So if you can get that thing done in two minutes per slide, that’s perfect. You’re gonna buy yourself time because your elevator pitch should be 15 or 20 seconds, which you just bought yourself a minute and a half there. So you’re going to buy yourself time as you go along. If you have your problem, just like we outlined in the problem slide that shouldn’t go that far.
Now there might be some discussion around these things and you’re going to have to manage that discussion by looking at your time. Sometimes I’ll say, hey, do we want to talk about this now? Do we want to talk about it later? Can we go over an hour? I’ll actually say that were scheduled for an hour to what we have time afterwards and if they say no then they’ve said no. It’s given them control the meaning. But then what you can say is, well, given the hour, how about I get through this or what do you want to do? How do you want to do this and let them tell you so that if you don’t get through they’ve controlled that action. It’s really important. Real quick summary.
Seven tips when you’re giving your pitch to investors, research your audience, present realistic data, nail your elevator pitch, keep track of your time because the meeting will be 50 minutes. Answer the exit question. Back up everything and practice. Thanks for being generous with your time and joining us for this episode of build a business success secrets. Before we go, let me ask you a quick question, Are you the type of person who wants to get 100% out of your time? Talent and ideas? If so, you’ll love our monthly built a business Success secrets newsletter.
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